Benjamín Labatut

he was not so much interested in the world as he was invaded by its many forms.

the man who pulled bread from air

He spent nine months there, consumed by hatred, humiliated by the conditions the victorious parties had imposed on his adopted country, and feeling betrayed by the cowardice of the generals, who had surrendered rather than fighting to the last man.

In the last letter he sent to his wife from Russia, written the same day he chose to share his discovery with Einstein, Schwarzschild complains of something strange that has begun to grow inside him: “I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”
Soon afterwards, that shadow invaded his body.

“If researchers want to apprehend my work, they must first deactivate the thought patterns that they have installed in their brains and taken for granted for so many years,” Mochizuki wrote on his blog.

Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?

which not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity

Cantor was born and raised in Russia, a nation whose inhabitants have become famous for their depth of feeling, the intensity of their religious and political beliefs, and a certain inclination for all things tragic,

Meanwhile, Nelly said, artists had already fully embraced it; she believed that the rediscovery of the irrational was the driving force behind all vanguard movements, movements that, even to a lay observer, were evidently suffused with a Faustian, boundless energy, a haste, a tragic fall in which everything was permitted.

Cantor could apparently demonstrate that there were as many points in a one-inch line as there were in all of space. He had taken a giant leap into the unknown and found something unique, something that nobody had ever considered before him, but his critics, who were many and varied, argued that he had simply gone too far. His infinities, while undoubtedly interesting, could never be considered objects for serious mathematical study. However, Cantor was armed with a proof that seemed completely airtight. “I see it, but I don’t believe it!” 79he wrote to a close friend when he had finished it, and his biggest problem, from then on, was that so many others were equally unable to accept this new and confounding article of faith.